Illustrator Ed Harrington has some pretty subversive ideas about the fictional characters you grew up with. He draws what you might call outtakes, or maybe behind-the-scenes images that you don't get to see in movies or TV shows. He-Man, the Jetsons, Winnie-the-Pooh, Star Trek, Sesame Street, and the Smurfs all get the Harrington treatment.



Check out a ranked gallery of Harrington's pop culture illustrations at Bored Panda, or all of them at Instagram. Then check out Harrington's designs you can wear yourself in his collection of t-shirt designs in the NeatoShop!

Leafhoppers, treehoppers, and planthoppers are insects that come in all shapes and sizes, some of which are beautiful, while others are pretty funny-looking. Ze Frank introduces them to us in an insect version of a fashion show, with a sidebar explanation of some of their more unsavory features in the middle. Just as you'd expect from Ze Frank.

Thanksgiving Day is only three weeks away, so it's time to look for sales on frozen turkey and plan your menu for the Thanksgiving feast. You'll probably make (or just eat) the same traditional foods your family has always enjoyed, but you can always learn more about those dishes. For example, did you know that sweet potatoes aren't even potatoes? And get this- they aren't yams, either.

True potatoes like russets are members of the nightshade botanical family, while sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family. But that doesn’t make sweet potatoes yams either; though they aren’t actually potatoes, orange sweet potatoes are their own thing. Yams, which are often white or yellowish on the inside, are related to lilies and grasses and mostly grow in tropical environments.

Whatever you call them, it's the tradition that matters. Learn other new facts about Thanksgiving food at Mental Floss. Then we can all be thankful for a holiday centered around eating.

(Image credit: Flickr user Alexis Lamster)

The photorealistic CGI version of The Lion King did not quite connect with audiences. Screen Junkies explains exactly why in this Honest Trailer, as if you didn't already know. Still, they found plenty of other things to critique about The Lion King remake, except for Beyonce, who is beyond criticism.

The Size of Space is an interactive site by Neal Agarwal that takes us through the relative size of heavenly bodies from an astronaut to the observable universe. Considering some of the objects that fall in between, we can bet that the observable universe is a lot bigger than it was even 50 years ago ("observable" being the growth factor).

While you might not be amazed at the relative size of the planets, you will learn something new. There are moons in our solar system that are larger than some planets in our solar system. We know about at least one star that is smaller than Earth. And how astronomers have mapped out the larger universe is pretty impressive. -via Boing Boing

Remember the experiment mugumogu did to see how small a hole Maru and Hana could get through? Octopuses are even more fluid than cats- the only rigid part of its body is the beak. How small a hole can an octopus squeeze through if he wanted to?

Arnold is an octopus who lives at Octolab. Arnold's favorite possession is his barrel, which gives him an incentive in this experiment. A transparent wall allows him to see the target, and a hole of decreasing size makes getting to it a challenge. Arnold eventually gives up, but we don't know if that was due to lack of ability or lack of motivation. After all, just because he can squeeze that soft brain through a small hole doesn't mean it's a healthy idea. -via Laughing Squid

This past summer, workers at Microsoft Japan were able to take Fridays off without losing any pay. The company announced that productivity went up 40% during that period. The company will run the trial again in the winter. One might guess that a motivated workforce wasted less time during the four-day week, but the exact mechanics of the increased productivity have not been publicized yet. One factor may have been a new rule that meetings would be limited to a half-hour for no more than five employees at once.

Four-day workweeks made headlines around the world in the spring of 2018, when Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand trust management company, announced a 20% gain in employee productivity and a 45% increase in employee work-life balance after a trial of paying people their regular salary for working four days. Last October, the company made the policy permanent.

The Microsoft trial roughly doubled Perpetual Guardian's productivity gain. But for now at least, the company isn't saying whether it will test the four-day workweek policy in other locations or consider making it permanent.

While a four-day week with five-day pay may sound wonderful, there are other factors to consider. In the United States, being classified as part-time may mean losing benefits, even if the pay remains the same as a full-time job. Read about the Microsoft experiment at NPR. -via Metafilter

Food design studio Bompas & Parr has produced a meringue that is so light and airy that a serving weighs only one gram. The designers consulted with the makers of Aerogel in Germany to turn egg whites into air and fluff. Aerogel is made by removing the water from a gel and replacing it with a gas.

The process used to create the meringue begins with a hydrogel of egg white, which is cast in a mould before being submerged in a bath of calcium chloride and water.

The liquid in the jelly is then replaced with liquid carbon dioxide, which can be transformed into gas during a process known as super-critical drying.

The gas is removed by venting, leaving behind nothing but the skeleton of the original gel. This results in a meringue comprising 96 per cent air and weighing just one gram.

It looks nice and is probably easy to transport, but where's the sugar? It seems like a crucial ingredient if you are going to call something a "dessert." Unfortunately, my kitchen is missing some important equipment needed for this recipe. Boompas & Parr describes it as "a taste of the sky", but we have yet to hear from anyone who has eaten the Aerogel Meringue. Read more at Dezeen. -via Nag on the Lake

About 26% of the Netherlands lies below sea level. How does that work? The Dutch needed the land, so they figured out how to reclaim it from the ocean. They built dikes, for sure, but there is a lot of world-class engineering involved in controlling the water. In this video, Tom Scott shows us around the Waterloopbos, a laboratory used to test scale models of much larger water-control projects like the Delta Works. Read more about the Waterloopbos here.  -via reddit

Lauren Boutz fosters kittens for the City of Albuquerque Animal Welfare Department. She calls this litter of kittens her "Powerpurr Girls," and named them Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. Above you see Gary Sanchez taking a portrait of Blossom as she poses and smiles! Click to the right on the image above to see a closer look and the iPhone picture. The pictures turned out to be so cute they went viral. Blossom has become famous, but she hasn't let it go to her head. She's still her cute, playful self. See more pictures of Blossom as well as Bubbles and Buttercup at Bored Panda.

You've seen memes about getting drunk and buying something ridiculous online, like a goat for one's apartment. In this case, the buyer was not drunk, but mistakenly bought 1,000 chickens anyway. Steve Morrow of Hamilton, New Zealand, saw an auction on the online site Trade Me for "one 1000" chickens.   

Morrow said he thought the highest bidder could take as many birds as they wanted and the seller would continue to auction the rest of them off until they were all gone.

He said he put in an auto bid for $20, thinking he could at least get two hens.

"When the auction closed, I thought 'this is great', I could take as many birds as I wanted," Morrow said.

"But when I spoke to the man and he said it was for 1000 hens ... holy moly, I was stunned, I can tell you that."

When the automatic auction ended, Morrow had gotten all those chickens for a mere $1.50. After processing the shock, Morrow went to work trying to find takers for the birds. The online response was good, and he has already found homes for 700 of them. Read the full story at Stuff. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Amity Beane)

It's been a joke ever since the advent of modern art- if this painting were hung upside down, would anyone know the difference? Alex Boese looked up cases in which that actually happened. Yes, museums and galleries have been known to hang pictures upside down, or even sideways. While most could be classified as modern art, they are not all abstracts. The image at the top is a case in which critics assumed the painting was abstract, but it was only upside-down.

At a 1915 art exhibition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, "The Blue Pool," by George Bellows, was hung in a conspicuous location. Several artists gave talks at the event in which they referenced it, describing it as "modern in treatment." It was only after three weeks that the exhibitors realized they had hung the painting upside-down. When righted, the seemingly abstract swatches of color transformed into a more familiar scene of a pool of water surrounded by rocks.

Read 13 stories of art displayed the wrong way, and even more examples of people making that joke about it, at Weird Universe.

Silvia Galva died in her home in Hallandale Beach, Florida, in July when she was stabbed by a spear with a 12-inch blade. Adam Reechard Crespo, Galva's boyfriend, told police that Galva had stabbed herself accidentally during an altercation between the two. Crespo was arrested on a second-degree murder charge. A month later, police obtained a warrant for data from Galva's Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, hoping there was a recording of the incident.

“It is believed that evidence of crimes, audio recordings capturing the attack on victim Silvia Crespo that occurred in the main bedroom ... may be found on the server maintained by or for Amazon,” police wrote in their probable cause statement seeking the warrant.

Whether police stumbled across a silent witness or are overestimating the eavesdropping capacity of smart technology remains to be seen. Amazon turned over multiple recordings, but neither the company, police, nor the State Attorney’s Office will say at this point what was on them.

“We did receive recordings, and we are in the process of analyzing the information that was sent to us,” said Hallandale Beach Police Department spokesman Sgt. Pedro Abut.

Whether the recordings have any relevance to the case or not, it will be interesting to find out exactly how much of what is said in a home ends up on Amazon's servers, retrievable at a later date. Read more on the story at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Gregory Varnum)

Thor is the most awkward of the Avengers. And that totally make sense. I mean, look at him. He's also a deity. The writers had to do something to make him seem at least a little human, so they gave him plenty of weird faux pas to make the character somewhat relatable. Of course, the awkwardness comes across as cute, because... well, look at him, in this supercut of those awkward moments. -via Geeks Are Sexy  

In a cave south of Barcelona, archaeologists found a toe bone from an eagle that showed clear evidence of the talon being cut off with a tool. That discovery joined about a dozen other raptors with cut talons found at digs believed to be from Neanderthal settlements. This excavations range from 130,000 to 44,000 years old. They point to the possibility that Neanderthals wore jewelry made of raptor talons.  

"I think it is an important addition to growing body of evidence of personal ornament usage in Neanderthals, now spanning more than 80,000 years," says Davorka Radovčić, a curator at the Croatian Natural History Museum, Zagreb, who studied the talons at Krapina but was not involved in the new study.

Neanderthals lived from Portugal to Eurasia, but their penchant for using raptor claws seems restricted to a specific region of southern Europe, from northern Spain through southern France and northern Italy to Croatia, says the lead author of the new study, Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, a researcher at the Institute of Evolution in Africa (IDEA), which is based in Madrid. Did wearing talon jewelry have special meaning for Neanderthals living in this geographic area?

"We think that the talons are related to the symbolic world of the Neanderthals," Rodríguez says. While it's difficult or even impossible to know what these symbols actually meant to Neanderthals, their use may imply that Neanderthals were practicing a form of communication.

These artifacts are much too old to have been created by homo sapiens, who arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals wearing ornamentation with no use in survival points to their capability of symbolic thought. Read about the discoveries and what they may mean at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Lou-Octavia Mørch)